Businesses that supply services or goods are often asked by customers to provide competitive bids, such as in an auction bidding context or in a traditional request for price/request for quote (RFP/RFQ) context. From the perspective of the customer, a single bid is submitted by each particular business, which bid may be adjusted as several rounds of bidding occur. Although a single external bid is presented by a particular business to the customer in each round of bidding, it is noted that a business may have multiple business entities that provide corresponding component bids that make up the external bid. As the external bid is adjusted, the component bids of the individual business entities are impacted.
Traditionally, a “bottom-up” technique is used in which a business prepares its external bid based on summing component bids from the various business entities of the business. Thus, if the external bid is lowered, then each business entity of the enterprise has to prepare a new component bid. This bottom-up approach is relatively slow as the approach involves mostly manual work. Therefore, the conventional “bottom-up” approach cannot be used in a fast-paced on-line bidding environment in which a particular business may have to revise its external bids (and the component bids associated with the various business entities of the business) within a relatively short amount of time (hours or even minutes).
Also, because of the manual nature of using conventional approaches of adjusting component bids based on a revised external bid, the adjustments are usually error-prone. Errors can result from mistakes in data entry and in calculations. In addition, in some cases, adjustments of component bids due to a lowered external bid may cause component bids for at least some of the business entities to be too low.